WOOD CARE GUIDE

Call us old-fashioned, but we believe in running an honest, ethical company.

Showing you the feedback we got from our Kickstarter survey is our first step on the journey of radical transparency!

Our main goal in running this survey was to see if there were any quality issues that we needed to address. Based on the data, we see 2 issues that were reported by more than one person: discoloration of wood tops, and gasket issues.

Here is what we are changing going forward to remedy these issues:

Discoloration of Wood Tops

We chose not to seal the Kickstarter wood tops with a water-resistant, protective polyurethane because this would make the wood tops unusable as a cutting board or food tray. We wanted to use our Kickstarter buyers as a test group to see how many people would actually end up using these as cutting boards, before we determine what finish we will put on our mass production tops.

As you can see above, only 1 survey respondent reported using their top in a capacity that would require the finish to be food-safe.

When we asked how important it was to have a food-safe finish on the tops, we see that the average response was 4 - meaning most people were either neutral or didn’t care at all about a food-safe finish.

This is great news for us, because it means we can best serve you by sealing our future wood tops with a polyurethane. This will protect your tops from getting water stains, and will greatly reduce discolorations that occur from heat or lack of regular wood care/conditioning.

If you prefer to keep your Kickstarter pieces raw rather than finishing them with a polyurethane, please read our wood care guide to keep your piece looking good as new!

Gasket Issues

Two users reported that the gasket on the bottom of their piece extended slightly beyond the wood substrate, which causes the sticky backing to attract lint, and could cause it to eventually separate from the wood.

We actually noticed this issue ourselves during this run, and had already started on a solution before we received these comments.

The issue we ran into concerned the typical thicknesses of woods available on the market. We had originally designed the bottom lip to extend 1" thick, but our fabricator had no choice but to reduce to overall thickness of this lip to about 3/4" because finding wood of the thickness we originally designed is extremely difficult because this is not a standard wood thickness, and (if you can find that size) it's very expensive. Sticking with our original design and thickness for the bottom lip would have resulted in tops that would have been double the cost, with no added value to our customers.

When we switched to the 3/4" thick bottom lip, we didn't realize our gasket would end up sticking out past the wood slightly, causing the issues reported by 2 users in our survey.

To remedy this, in the future, the underside of our small wood tops will look like this instead:

The strips allow us to sidestep the issue of standard wood thicknesses, and also helps us save material - making your top lighter (which will mean cheaper shipping costs for you)!

It will not impact the appearance of your furniture from the top.

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Thank you so much to all those who purchased furniture through our Kickstarter, and EXTRA thanks to those of you who filled out the survey and helped us identify/solve these issues before going into full production mode.

We are currently working with our fabricator to test and price check the changes we outlined above before opening our first pre-order round in the summer of 2019!